As part of the podcast that I record with my friend we're revisiting the films of Paul Verhoeven, and this morning we re-watched Starship Troopers. We've each seen it many times at this point, so every viewing allows us to focus on something different that we might not have picked up before. This time, it was something that was staring me in the face the whole time.
So, the film takes place on an Earth that seems to have a single global government called the Federation. The society is post-racial and radically gender equal (men and women fight together in combat units, for instance). But one thing I'd never noticed, which I almost certainly should have, is that no one ever speaks a language other than English. Their world doesn't just have one government, it was one culture, and for as equal as everyone seems to be, it suddenly struck me that they're equal because they've completely eliminated differences in culture and values. Everyone seems to listen to the same music, wear the same clothes, play the same sports, etc.
A few weeks ago we watched Verhoeven's 2006 war film Black Book, and in the beginning of that story a Dutch man hiding a Jew tells the Jew that if she had just accepted Jesus, none of this, meaning the Holocaust, would have happened to her. That moment, along with Starship Troopers, have stuck out very clearly to me as examples of the mentality of white Americans that if other cultures would just stop insisting on being different and being themselves, and instead be more like us, everything would be fine and none of this would be happening to them.